The Use of Color in Film

Introduction

Visual – whether black and white, color, with a certain hue or with certain color palette in films has significance with the theme of the film or to derive meaning in the scene/story.Each color evokes different emotion and guides us in a certain direction which adds to the storytelling as well as visual engrossment. In short, color itself has a subplot in the film.

While colors are broadly signified as warm colors and cool colors and collectively give similar sense but if individually represented it derives its own meaning and symbol.

For instance – blue, green and yellow are cool colors and collectively used gives us a sense of peacefulness and happiness while if the color green is used individually it gives an eerie feeling. For instance in matrix (including sequels), the green tone gives a sense of tardiness and sickness in the neo’s world as compared to the real world.Also, when some evil is to be shown, the visual is flooded with green.

While the direct meaning to the tint is to show the primitive technology when the monitors used to have a green tone, it also has subdued meaning to it. The researcher tends to analyze how the use of certain color or color palette helps in adding a mood, understand the emotion, builds character, derives meaning and influences the plot. Color also helps in establishing the setting, period and location of the film. Patti Bellantoni in his book “If it’s Purple someone’s gonna die” has used six major colors, dividing into sub sections (different shades/type of the color) and illustrated its effect in different films.

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The researcher has adopted this method to analyze the film on hand by reading each film with the predominant colors used and the inference it makes. With this book as a primary source and other research paper and articles as supporting sources, there are four major colors that come into play while analyzing a film, i.e., Blue, Red, Green and Yellow.

The Use of Color in Film The Use of Color in Film The Use of Color in Film

Blue

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